Page:A history of the gunpowder plot-The conspiracy and its agents (1904).djvu/98

80 exception of a brief expedition undertaken to tell Percy of what had happened. Catesby and John Wright fled, thereupon, to join Digby, but the other conspirators remained.

At a little before midnight, Faukes was captured just outside the house, by a body of men under Sir Thomas Knyvet, and the gun-powder was discovered beneath the fuel. Thus were dissipated, before the Abbey clock boomed forth the hour which ushered in the morn of the eventful Fifth of November, 1605, all the vain and foolish hopes, which a handful of desperate fanatics had for so long cherished, of destroying by one diabolical stroke, the power of Protestantism in Great Britain, for the purpose of restoring to its old and supreme position the fallen faith of Rome.